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My heart be still! Airbus will deliver this week the first Orion service module to NASA.

Airbus will deliver the first European Service Module (ESM) for NASA’s Orion spacecraft from its aerospace site in Bremen, Germany on 5 November 2018. An Antonov cargo aircraft will fly the ESM to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. This is the result of four years of development and construction, and represents the achievement of a key milestone in the project. ESA selected Airbus as the prime contractor for the development and manufacturing of the first ESM in November 2014.

Four years to simply build a single manned capsule’s service module. At this pace we might be able to colonize Mars and the Moon in about 200 years, maybe!

Note however that NASA only has funding to build 1.5 of these European service modules. It is possible that Congress has allocated additional funds, but if so, I missed it.

5 comments

But I must interject a point of clarification, because while the pace is glacial, Orion is never, ever going anywhere near Mars. And everyone who’s ever worked on it knows that. It’s long past time for NASA to stop intimating that SLS and Orion has anything to do with Mars.

Bob Z – “At this pace we might be able to colonize Mars and the Moon in about 200 years, maybe!”

A friend of mine, civil engineer on some major New York City projects, expresses it this way – “If they had the modern government project review and approval process during the westward expansion, we would now be getting close to the Susquehanna River”

And Airbus? It was founded as a government jobs program and it remains so. So work as slowly as possible because if we ever actually FINISH this ting, we’ll no longer have a job.

Way tangent, I digress terribly- I’d love to know what the civil engineer, thinks about Robert Moses? (infamous NY Urban Planner responsible for some $25 billion in government project’s over his career; 658 playgrounds, 416 miles of parkways, and 13 bridges.” )
–interesting factoid; he never learned how to drive a car!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

“Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America’s quest for the moon… Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America’s greatest human triumphs.”
–San Antonio Express-News